Drabble a Day for a Week:Each day for a week I did an exercise to create the most awful opening line for a speculative fiction novel. Here they are with added typos and homonyms.

1. Last Conflict

The Gogleerth came thundering over the hill, rattling their highly polish swords on their pearlescent amour; the moaning sun lingered glintingly on a thousand tones of amassed steel designed to stroke trembling fear into the hearts of the enema.
On the hill top the invading army shone like a disturbed ants nest only lager with more legs and more highlyer fettled blades.
D’Fut picked at the flea that has just settled down to brunch in his chest hair and he bited into it enjoying the pop and subsequent crunch and tasting his ownly blood irony.
“Death to all Horothrinchians and their immediate family.” Screamed D’Fut as he urged his great warhearse to chunter.

2. Pharmacy Quest

The Ingricosmic craft drifted more silently through the clouds than a sleeping bat. The water laden air spattered over the hull and formed brief droplets on the windows before the craft decentred into clear air.
Cath sits at the controls, teeth grinding together like wagonwheels.
“I’m not going.” She says. “However much you plead.”
Frome sits silent as a dead bull elephant, scanning the radar with his salubrious eye, watching encrypted telemetry data pour over the old beta screen.
“You picked up that threadworm in T’anusi you can get your own worming powder.”
“But my plog itches.” Whined Frome.
“Then perhaps you will be more careful about what gets put in it in the future.”

3. Chatting with the Urethrapod

The Urethrapod shone a greenish light from the entrance of the mystical cave.
“Oh wise one… Oh wise one… What secrets can you tell us.”
“You should know, young neophyte that I am not infallible.”
“We are all fallible. You have taught me will in thy words.” Intoned the neophyte.
The Urethrapod flashed red from a moment then dulled back to a crisp emerald.
“So what do you ask of me?”
“Must we have to continue speaking in this pretentious gibberishtic style which dredges up arcane language spoken 300 aeons whence?”
“No… But you must promise not to tell the tribe, they kind of expect it.”

4. K’Flu’nng’s bar

K’Flu’nng’s muscles flexed as he probed the bowl of nibbles on the bar. He was bored.
“Bring out more wenches.”
“We only have one left sire.”
“Then bring me one and pop down N’oogit’f market.” Roared K’Flu’nng. “The one you have, is she gorgeous?”
“As beautiful as bubbles in a quart of marsh-brew!”
“Bring her… I want to feel her plogs and run my tentacle over her tentacles while she runs her tentacles over my tentacles.”
“You asked for me master.” The buxom wench runs over nervously.
“You know what I want.” K’Flu’nng’s voice rings out in the bar.
“I have it here.” The wench pulls a slender glass jar filled with a crystalline liquid.
“Is that what I think it is?” K’Flu’nng’s voice fired with deep baritone laughter.
“Of course… Liquid apostrophes…”

5. Bed Time in Voolithia

The zephyr oozed through the bonbanog tree and ruffled the flubbox-hair on F-kk’s loins.
“Ahhh.” He sighed this is the life.
“Dad!” Yelled his son over the intercom shattering F-kk’s peaceful reverie. “Will you recite pi to three thousand places again.”
“You are supposed to be in bed.”
“I can’t logoff.”
“Well force a shutdown and be quiet my noggits are exhausted from carrying you all day.”

6. Marking

GrunF urinated copiously and noisily onto the stones that marked the farthermost northwest corner of his expansive territory. Then he sniffed the air with his magnificently bespangled trunk, letting the scents of the morning: stone, grass, earth, dew, trickle over his myriad nasal buds.
He smiled. No threats hung in the air: no alien smells, no rampaging males, and disappointingly no females on heat.
“Well.” He sighed in the local dialect. “Perhaps I shall have a day off.” Then stepping behind a smooth barked tree he mused to himself, “Which of my bowels should I move first.”

7. Apocalyptic Spoiler

Kajoi opened up the K-type plobe and pulled out the leggy polished wires. Another day in the generator. Today he would change the planet’s ecosystem forever. He just didn’t know it yet. It would be an accident of course. A quantum polarity inverter, a purge valve left open by a cleaner and a carelessly wielded tentacle. Oh if only Kajoi knew he would have stayed in his nest and stroked his plog until lunchtime. But Kajoi did not have the gift of seeing into the future. Today the world would change.

17 Responses to Terrible opening paragraphs for never to be written science fiction novels

I never thought of honing my apparent skill at lousy or ‘lousey’ openings. Maybe I would paradoxically birth that gripping lead-in I’ve been after for the last three-years. That’d be ‘bloody irony’ to be sure. Thanks for the laughs…and a great break from writer’s block.

I look forward to reading your terrible efforts. Sometimes it is good to throw everything up in the air and start again. I just rewrote the first chapter of 400 Years Between Stars. It is 1000 words tighter but 1000 times better. But sometimes it is so hard to scrap a draft and just go again. I will come and investigate your blog before asking lots of questions about what you are working on.

Hmm, so I guess you found I’ve been working on plenty of hiking, biking and adventures and not so much of my writing this summer…I’m slowly plugging away on my novel and sequel editing. I have a deadline in mid-October I want to submit for, so time to get crackin’!

Only project on my blog is Essence Churning, my short story collection and some random poetry and flash fiction. If you choose the topic Literary Fiction at the bottom of my home page, it will pull up my writing that’s posted. I haven’t posted novel excerpts at this point. Thanks for your interest in my work!

obviously like your web site but you need to test the spelling on quite a few of your posts. Several of them are rife with spelling issues and I in finding it very bothersome to tell the truth however I will certainly come again again.

I was searching through some old files today and I found this. It really is a shame there is no market for horrible opening paragraphs. My favourite feature of this piece is the point of view (or lack of one)…

The inn was crowded. Brant sat lowering over his mug of ale like a huge bear. Muscles picked out like oily ropes in the fire that glinted in the grate. A young stable lad came in from the quadrangle outside struggling to bear the magnificent weight of a yew branch. As he walked unsteadily across the hard stone flags that covered the floor he stumbled over the forgotten leg of a drunkard. Sprawling to the floor the log clattered and bounced knocking over a chair and buxom wench as it did so. Brant, reactions fast as lightning put out a heavy leather boot to stop the roll of the careering log. For a moment his boot sat atop the log as if it had conquered a mountain on its own. Brant stared into the eyes of the stable boy. The stable boy stared back in fear, trembling, feeling as if he were staring into the endless abyss as Brant’s depthless eyes stared back at him like pools of brown darkness. Then with a sudden move that made the stable boy draw breath Brant leant forward and picked up the massive yew log. For a moment the dark grain shone in the light before being tossed into the conflagration. Brant lifting it as easily as if it were a matchstick. The boy cast down his eyes like excited cinders and went to help his father behind the bar.
Brant’s date was late. She should have been there in the early evening. Now it was getting late.